TV producers originally considered Dame Jilly Cooper’sRivals too silly to adapt into a series, said showrunner Dominic Treadwell-Collins.
Cooper, who has died following a fall aged 88, is one of the UK’s most celebrated authors, best known for her steamy fiction focusing on scandal and adultery in upper-class society. She wrote Rivals in 1988, the second book in her Rutshire Chronicles series, which depicts the sordid ongoings in a power struggle between two television companies in the Cotswolds.
